Conner Root

I just had to resolve over 120 merge conflicts.

A FINAL ROUND OF CUTS

Since this is truly our final week of development, we had to cut anything that had not been started or had too much left to do and no one to take on the work. The biggest thing cut was the boss stages. It fell through the cracks, and our designer did not know that it had been finished. While it was not a huge task, we don’t have the time to actually test the stages after we set them up.

Apart from that, there were minor cuts, like a piece of a level and some cutscenes. The monkey bars were also cut because the freelancer we had given the work to was unable to complete the work, and we had no one else to give the task(s) to. We almost had to cut a cutscene for the river, but I was able to throw something together for our final release candidate from a few days ago.

ALMOST BARELY ON STEAM

In the next day or so, we will have our page officially posted on Steam! The store page had been approved apart from a few minor changes for a few days, but we wanted to wait a bit until we had a trailer ready to maximize impressions we got from Steam’s initial push for a new product on the store.

The build, however, needed a bit more work to get approved. Luckily, they were a product of the alpha build we submitted being a bit too early, so the final release candidate submitted today should satisfy Steam’s concerns, and we will be fully on track for release on May 13th.

THE COMING WEEKS

Really, this time it’s just the coming ‘week.’ Once we finish our Gold build this weekend, there should not be any more actual development work. I and a few others have a bug or two to fix, but otherwise it is just a little bit of essential polish to clean up the experience. I am a bit worried about our chances of pulling it all off. Recently (like with the monkey bars) work just has not been getting done.

In all fairness, it being the run-up to finals, with graduation around the corner for us seniors, it has been rough finding the necessary time and energy to get work done. However, there have been a few moments where a team member just didn’t do any of it, and did not make it clear that was not going to get done.

Thankfully, the work we have planned combined with the cuts we made will create a fairly clean experience, I can’t help but feel the game will be a bit hollow, because all of the stuff we could not get to because of our failings to complete tasks. Regardless, I would rather put my name on a solid, albeit slightly lacking experience than a buggy, hard-to-play one with a few more features.